Graphics card woes

[daglob]

I haven't been able to play FFv3R, because everyting was black during gameplay. Well, my brother gave me a Geoforce FX 5500 video card, I installed it, and I can play FFv3R.
However, stuff alpha-ed out in FF1 shows up clear... that is opaque... as day. I did a skin for Steve Ditko's Missing Man, who is mainly a stick figure with hair and glasses. The character really looks weird in game, where you can see through the "body". Now the body is opaque. He is on Male Basic Effects.
That isn't the only problem: most of Batman's capes are flat along the bottoms, and his "fins" are a "fin". On most of the skins for Male Alpha, the formerly transparent parts are transparent no longer. This one puzzles me, since not all the skins are affected, just most of them. I tried re-saving Missing man, with the Alpha channel on and made sure it was 32 bit, but it still looks like a guy in a black suit with bluish stripes.
Character Tool 1 crashes a lot, and some of the meshes look "broken". Some parts move, while others remain rigid. In the animations arms, legs and body parts do not move the same say, leaving a lot of disjointed parts. This does not seem to be a problem in the regular game.
There are a lot more pink meshes in Character Tool 2, at least some of which I know didn't used to be that way.

I'm supposed to have the most recent driver, although the Nvidia site suggested a differenct one. By the way, I haven't been able to find out where I can ask them a question. They have a forum, but I only found two references to Freedom Force, neither of them helpful. I didn't register and ask them, because I wanted to check with this group first.

Has anyone had this problem before?

[GogglesPizanno]

I had that problem a few years ago with the first game and a GeForce Card.
I think I was able to fix it by going back a couple of drivers (at that time).

I've had an ATI card for a while now, but if I remember correctly, I used to keep 3 or 4 of the various "stable" benchmark versions of the Nvidia drivers just for this kind of thing. It always seemed from looking online at hardware forums and what not, that the best Nvidia drivers were always ones that were actually like 6 months old.

Don't know if thats still the case, but it might be worth checking out.

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

FF1 was infamous for mesh transparencies not working consistently, one of the things they improved on for FFvTTR.

[tommyboy]

I'd second the "try different versions of the Nvidia drivers" suggestion.
My card seems to "like" the default set that came with it far more than any of the newer ones, (which, I'm guessing, were made to optimize other, newer, chipsets.)

[daglob]

I thank everyone who answered, but the problems seems to have solved itself, but that doesn't meant it's fixed. Any time the screen has to re-write fast, there is a very good chance that the program running will crash; total, complete, click anywhere on the screen and all it does is beep-even the Minimize-Restore-Close buttons don't work and neither does Alt-Ctrl-Delete crash. This includes zooming in and out in Photoshop. I'll play a little more in FFv3R, but in a choice between it and Photoshop...